Interview with Aśka

Western Australia’s vast landscape encompasses an abundance of rich  histories and communities. How has your experience in Western Australia shaped your artistic practice and worldview? 

I’ve always been drawn to wide, open spaces, and that’s part of the reason I settled in WA. A lot of people describe the landscape in our backyard as ‘a lot of nothing’ or ‘monotonous’, but I couldn’t disagree more.  

There is so much excitement in the scales of the land, water, and sky, so much subtle colour and texture magic, and so much wild, storytelling energy. Every time I go on a road trip, I can feel it, and I am inspired. 

I’ve had the luck of travelling quite a bit across the state with my various jobs, and experiencing how different the remote communities are from the metropolitan centre, and from each other. It’s like crossing country borders, and I find this endlessly fascinating. 

I have made several comics that are either set in WA or in a landscape echoing our own, which use the journey through this land as the vehicle for the story. 

It’s hard to overstate how important living here for the last 18 years has been to my practice, my sense of aesthetic, and a sense of freedom in my creative and personal life. 

What makes up your cultural and/or personal identity—does it come from a sense of belonging to place, ancestry, heritage, or something else entirely?  

This is a difficult question for me to answer.  

My brain is wired to reject being categorised, measured or grouped. I remember rebelling against my surname as a child because it was a “barcode”, and today, I don’t use one. The same goes for gender, ethnicity and any other category, really.   

You might have noticed my name uses a special character, which I guard abrasively. It comes from my Polish heritage, which ironically I am very quick to dismiss if anyone asks.  

I’ve lived in 5 countries, learned 5 languages and went to 6 Australian high schools, so no one can blame me for having a bit of a nomadic, cultural dysphoria. The only way I was able to make sense of this transience was to demarcate my own identity lines.  

So here we are: “I am Aśka, I am an Australian visual storyteller, and don’t forget the line over the ‘s’!” You all just have to live with any contradictions you find in that statement. 

I suppose my strongest identity anchor is my work, and to an extent my creative community, because this is where I get to experiment what it is to be ‘me’ without being constantly questioned.  

However, on occasion, even there, I find myself boxed in, battling a language that disempowers, rules that shackle, and ideologies that confuse. So perhaps my identity is also about freedom and elbow-room, and not having to commit to a fixed identity. 

In a way, this might be another reason that attracts me to WA so much. In a land as vast and wild as this, I could be anyone!  

In what ways do you hope your art contributes to preserving or evolving this cultural and/or personal identity?  

I have a strong urge to make stuff by digesting and reflecting upon my own experiences, in order to understand them myself, and to somehow be seen in the world by having others understand them too. My identity is wrapped up in this process. 

When it comes down to it, I see all art as ‘mincing the world’. An artist absorbs experiences to then present them to the world in a new format: meaty ideas mashed together from the artist’s unique vantage point.  

I love the medium of comics. They are a natural mode for my self-expression, lend themselves to self-analysis well, and are perfect for layering personal and cultural experiences in visual language. Comics is how I ‘mince the world’. 

By making comics in Perth, and being part of the comic-maker’s community, I am not only supporting local creator networks, but also helping to build a uniquely Australian comics scene. A scene which is full of creators who are also paying homage to places they call home, and who explore and search for their identities through their works.  

Could you speak to the artwork/s you have chosen to feature on Portside Review? Tell us how this work represents your art practice and philosophy. 

The work I am featuring is a current work-in-progress: a wordless graphic novel entitled Death & Bore Water.  

Over the eight chapters, the book explores the West Australian suburbia as another form of a natural environment. Its inhabitants interact with their surrounds and each other, while various stories unfold, spanning time, scale, earth, and sky. (FIG 1A : six consecutive pages)